Thursday, December 04, 2003

Well, the debacle that is Michael Jackson has now begun to unravel. There was a great editorial by Gerald Early in the 12/2 Wall Street Journal that made the obvious link from Jackson to Peter Pan as a man trying to stay forever young (the article is only available to subscribers online). I see that ABC news has done a piece in the same light from the medical/psychological perspective (he must be a victim, aren't we all?). The interesting aspect of the WSJ piece, however, was noting not only how Jackson has tried to transcend time by altering his appearance and recycling the style that brought him fame, but how he has tried to transcend race and gender as well in an apparent effort to appeal to everyone but in the end removing the core of his humanity and making him all but intelligible to real people. On the other hand maybe he's just weird.

Which of course makes it all the more hypocritical when his brother defends him by playing the race card ("a modern lynching" I believe was the phrase) and when Jackson played it himself several years ago accusing Sony of being racist because his records weren't selling. You would think that in a country hyper-sensitive to race (e.g. "hate-crimes" legislation, serious discussion of reparations, and campus speech codes) these kinds of baseless accusations would be revlealed for what they are. Unfortunately, bogus cries of racism from people in the favoured groups are almost never exposed and even more rarely condemned. As a great example, check out Ann Coulter's column from a few days ago where she correctly noted that:

"Sharpton libeled innocent men in the Tawana Brawley case. He inflamed angry mobs in Brooklyn's Crown Heights, leading to the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum. He incited an anti-Semitic pogrom against a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem, Freddy's, ending in a blaze of bullets and fire that left several employees dead."

Sharpton is given a free pass by both the media and the other Democrats simply because he is black.